On January 27th, journalist Robert Parry died from the complications of pancreatic cancer. He was young, just 68.
Many Kossacks knew him only as a gadfly who published on Consortium News narratives inconvenient to Democrats, especially as regards Ukraine and, more recently, the Russia investigation. He absorbed a lot of abuse for that.
But he was also one of the few journalists to defend the Clintons against the Whitewater smear. Early on, he recognized the authoritarian tactics that the Republicans had taken on. Writing in July/August 1994, he said:
More and more, Washington is a nasty place, like Dallas 1963. The nation’s capital is a city where rhetorical sniper rifles poke out of nearly every window. Character assassination has become a daily fact of life. Calumny is the new local dialect.
While all sides in Washington share blame for this epidemic of meanness, some are more responsible than others. For the well-funded conservative movement, slander has evolved into a sophisticated form of political control, a way to intimidate dissident voices during the Reagan-Bush years and now to threaten the political survival of a sitting Democratic president. [emphasis added]
If only more people had heeded him then, we might never have had a G.W. Bush and a Donald Trump. The evil at the root of the conservative slander machine might have been snuffed out while there was still a functioning press to do the job.
In the last few years, I stopped supporting Parry over the direction in which he took Consortium News. I believe he was wrong in his assessment of the role Russia has adopted in recent years. But I never ceased to recognize that Parry was an incredibly brave man, a man who put his career and even his life on the line to tell the truth as he saw it.
I am especially grateful for Parry’s truth-telling about the dirty wars in Central America. We Americans imagine ourselves to be such compassionate people, yet if even a very few more of us really cared about what happens in “shithole” countries, they wouldn’t have to endure the death squads, terrorization of union organizers, hunger, disease, and environmental dumping on indigenous peoples that is the norm in the dark corners of the empire. Bob Parry was one of those few who cared enough to speak out.
Parry became the target of coordinated smears by the Reagan and Bush White Houses over his revelations about American involvement in the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador, as well as his revelations of evidence that Ronald Reagan did reach an agreement with the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini to keep American hostages imprisoned, known as The October Surprise. The right-wing machine ran him out of job after job and blacklisted him in the corporate media, wrecking his career.
Parry was also one of the very few journalists who doggedly reminded the mainstream media that Gary Webb’s reporting on how contractors for the CIA were in part responsible for the cocaine epidemic of the 80s and 90s, was found to be correct by no less a person than the Inspector General of the CIA… even if what Webb actually wrote was twisted by journalistic enemies to imply that there was hard evidence of CIA direction of drug importation. Bob Parry knew that the US government was turning a blind eye to the drug activities of some of its contractors because he reported the first glimpses into Contra finance years before Gary Webb.
This is how Norman Solomon, writing in The Nation, describes the arc of Parry’s career:
After winning acclaim, including a Polk Award, as an Associated Press reporter who broke many big stories on deadly US policies in Central America, he spent three years at Newsweek—where he saw top editors collaborating with officials of the George H.W. Bush administration on what should be shared or withheld from the public. Bob left the magazine in 1990, and soon his relations with mainstream media had a whistle-blower quality. His 1992 book Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom named names and pulled no punches.
Midway through the decade, Bob did a stint as director of the Nation Institute’s investigative unit. His writing for The Nation during 1996 included pieces about the CIA and drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras, the bankrolled power of right-wing foundations, and a seven-page expose that is chilling to read more than 30 years later—an investigative report on the Koch brothers.
Sam Roberts at the NYT adds:
In 2015, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard awarded Mr. Parry the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. Last year, he received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, named for a 20th-century war correspondent and presented by a trust set up in her name.
(See also WaPo)
The Nieman Foundation writes:
Parry worked for Bloomberg News from 2000-2004. He has reported from Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Israel and Haiti and has taught at the New York University Graduate School of Journalism.
Former Nieman Foundation curator Bill Kovach, chair of the advisory committee that oversees the annual award, said, “Robert Parry has for decades been one of the most tenacious investigative journalists. Driven by his concern that the information flooding our communications system increasingly substitutes opinion for historical fact and undermines effective citizen and government decisions, he has created a unique news website to replace disinformation with facts based on deep research.”
Blase Bonpan of Truthdig writes what should be on Bob Parry’s memorial:
When I think of Bob, I am reminded of sitting in a D.C. bar with I. F. Stone. “I just can’t stand the suffering of the innocent,” he said.
I only hope that every reader—especially everyone who does journalism, even in the form of diaries at Daily Kos—will take that comment of Stone’s to heart. If we can stand the suffering of the innocent, we have lost our commitment to truth and justice. We are in many ways just less awful versions of Donald Trump.
Let us, all of us, refuse to be willing to stand the suffering of the innocent. Let us follow Bob Parry’s example in fearlessly telling the truth, even if it costs us our career, even our friends abandon us. Let us live so that when we are gone, people will remember us with the affection and gratitude that so many of the few remaining real journalists remember Bob Parry.